Month: September 2007

If you’re looking at this page and you’ve been here before you have obviously noted that the categories in the sidebar are misbehaving.

If you’ve been here before you probably also know that I’m not a web wizard. I don’t have an immediate answer to the sidebar, but the site seems perfectly usable otherwise, so you’ll have to bear with me awhile until I can finish upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.

UPDATE

Thanks to some help from Shelley Powers and WordPress’s Documentation, I think this site is back up and running. You’ll notice I eliminated Special Places as a Separate Category, that’s because I plan on creating Galleries of past pictures for each of those places rather than making new readers search through some meaningless words to find “the good stuff.”

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE

I’ve long wanted to change my monthly archives and category pages so that they begin with what I first wrote and end with my conclusions. I used to have my pages organized that way with I used MT, but it got lost in the conversion. Since I’d already spent the better part of two days looking at code, I decided to try to figure out how to do that. I ended up downloading a plugin for WordPress that allows me to set ascending or descending order for exactly the pages I want to. So, if you ever happen to check out the entries on a particular poet, you’ll be able to read them in the order I actually wrote them, and hopefully they’ll make better sense than before.

ONE MORE THING

I’ve also added a plugin that allows readers to edit their comments for two hours after they’ve left them so that they can review what they’ve written and correct errors. As one of those who hates it when he discovers that there are typos in comments I left, I’ve long been looking for something like this. Let me know if it works for you or not.

Like most people I’m easily distracted by bright lights and flashy colors, as shown by the photos I shared yesterday from the Pacific Science Center. After all, it’s difficult to ignore bird-sized, brilliant blue butterflies floating past at eye level. Heck, I’d worry if I were totally indifferent to such beauty.

If you stay long enough, though, you begin to see equally remarkable beauty that isn’t nearly as obvious or flashy. For instance, I thought it a little strange how many leaves had fallen on to a plate of fruit, until I realized that they weren’t leaves at all, but dully disguised butterflies:

I often find myself distracted by local residents rather than flashy exhibits. It’s hard to miss the large stegosaurus in the ponds outside the Science Center, but I was more interested in the local mallard ducks who used the statues as shelter:

I’m sure some people were wondering why I spent so long trying to get a picture of this flower

when there was so much else to see, but somehow it seemed to me that its simple beauty was enhanced by that very contrast.

Maybe one day I’ll learn to pay attention to the important things in life, but, at my age that’ll probably happen when:

I didn’t buy a year-long pass to The Pacific Science Center in Seattle just to go once a year. So, today Leslie and I headed up to look around. I was especially looking forward to visiting the Butterfly Garden without the crowds that we saw early in June. We were the first visitors through the door, and for quite awhile the only visitors in the Butterfly Garden.

When I first entered the garden it struck me that if there ever was a Garden of Eden, it would have to look like this, with beautiful blue-brown butterflies drifting overhead. Despite my best efforts, though, I couldn’t manage to capture a picture of this butterfly in flight, the only time I could see the blue top:

I wasn’t too disappointed, though because the muted browns and oranges seemed nearly as beautiful as the sky blue tops of the wings.

Truthfully, there were so many beautiful butterflies that it was hard to even stay focused long enough to get a good shot of any one of them.

This one was one of my favorites, I guess, because I had dozens of shots of it and its relatives:

I was also struck by the large number of black butterflies, a color I’ve not seen locally, but seemed widespread in South and Central America where most of those at the Pacific Science Center originated. If I hadn’t learned that today, I might have guessed that this butterfly was from Japan since his colors reminded me of a Japanese Kimono:

The science center provides large identification charts and if they had been local butterflies I would have learned their names, but since I’m unlikely to ever see one outside this garden, I chose to enjoy their beauty on a sensual, rather than intellectual level.